Enter the Labyrinth 4

Whispers from the Ocean

Whispers From the Ocean

Sunday, March 13th 2011, two days after the Tohoku earthquake.

I awoke to bright sunshine, knowing only my need to go outside and touch the earth and ocean. But since the earthquake all national news channels in Japan had been flipping between rescue attempts in the disaster zone and the situation at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility. Despite what appeared to be visual evidence to the contrary, the official media line was that everything there was under control; we later learned that three of the four main reactors at Fukushima went into meltdown, a fact concealed from the populace at the time. We were unsure… could we go outside? should we? what about the air, the water? was it safe for the soft, young bodies of our children? We simply didn’t know. The dissonance created by what we were sensing and feeling and what we were being told created huge uncertainties, compounding our feelings of disorientation and confusion. Undoubtedly, the fabric of reality had been ruptured with everybody in the entire country, perhaps even the whole world, somehow affected. During the event and still now, I felt we had been given a vision of the future, a time when unimaginable forces from within the earth rise up and clash with the most volatile of our technologies in eruptions too frightening to imagine. 

In the end, my need to be outside was greater than our fears, so we wrapped up and drove to Namuya beach, a small inlet north of Tateyama on the Tokyo Bay side of Chiba from where, on clear days, a view of Mount Fuji is possible. Situated about 100 km or 62 miles to the west of Tokyo, Mount Fuji is an active volcano and the tallest mountain in Japan. As an ancient, sacred being, Mount Fuji, or Fujisan as he is affectionately called by locals, is considered to be masculine. He has a special place in the national psyche, a reverence I always found easy to share.

Arriving at the beach, the first thing I always did was look for Fujisan. Faint and shielded by clouds, the mountain’s distinctive shape hovered like a mirage, a ghost on the horizon. Beams of sunlight bounced off the ocean’s surface while small, timid waves, so different from the black monsters on TV the day before, ran softly up the shore. The sparkling shimmer of the ocean and intense quiet leant a sacred, prayer-like quality to the moment:

Namuya Beach, Chiba, Japan, March 13th, 2011. Author’s photo

Slipping off my sandals I walked into the water up to my knees. Images of people affected by the earthquake floated in my mind’s eye, and sadness seeped into me from the water. What was this sadness? where was it coming from? Overwhelmed with grief, I let my tears mingle with the salty waters of Earth’s body. I did not know where I ended or where the water began. It was a moment in which “I” disappeared, leaving me with a deep yet inexplicable knowing that my own small need for healing was reflected in the whole, that we are all in need of healing, the Earth too.

Waves of emotions I do not have words for rose from the water and filled my body; I lost all sense of time. It was as if something greater was whispering—we are all susceptible to forces we cannot control. The destruction and loss of life was never intended. Earth is susceptible to forces she cannot control. What happens to one happens to all. The human interpretation of the earthquake was that it was destructive and damaging to us, but what of Earth? I left the water wanting to protect rather than blame, and with an overpowering need to respond.

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When the Dreaming Earth Roared

Of all the patriarchal outrages including racism, harassment of homosexuals, violence against women, non-personhood for women in legal, educational, and medical areas, it is nuclear power and weaponry that promise irreversible effects. (Charlene Spretnak).

I will never forget the day the earth roared, shook, and ripped apart. The Tohoku earthquake struck 70 km off the northeast coast of the main island, Honshu, when the Pacific plate subducted and rose over 30 metres in a matter of seconds. Registering 9.0 on the Japanese earthquake scale, the resulting tsunami claimed the lives of over 18,000 people and caused more than $210 billion of damage, making it the costliest natural disaster ever and Japan’s biggest crisis since World War II. The earthquake was so powerful it caused the earth to shift more than two degrees on its axis; the length of a day, the tilt of the Earth, and the speed of the Earth’s rotation were all altered as a result. Despite the passage of time Japan is still recovering; the damage caused to the Daiichi nuclear power facility located on the coast in the disaster zone sent three of the four main reactors there into meltdown. The full ecological and medical consequences of this catastrophe have never been officially investigated.

Commissioned in 1971 and currently the 15th largest nuclear reactor in the world, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility today sits broken beyond repair. More than 13 years after the disaster, the little-known truth is that the facility continues to release toxic radiation into the ocean and atmosphere, with consequences for the health and integrity of both land- and ocean-based life systems being left largely unexamined. In 2023 the Japanese government announced their intention to release millions of gallons of treated, yet still contaminated water, into the Pacific Ocean. The fallout from the earthquake for people and planet alike is ongoing.

Having lived through the earthquake, more than anything else I wanted to know how - how had we got here, to this place where we imagine and create such polluting, damaging technologies without any thought for the consequences on ourselves, our wider earth body and more-than-human kin?

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And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

(Thomas Hardy, 1912 from “Lines on the Loss of the Titanic”).

“Titanic” by German artist Willy Stoewer. Image: Bettman/Getty Images

One hundred years before the earthquake, in a juxtaposition so profound it almost seems to foreshadow the disaster at Fukushima, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. The poet Thomas Hardy sensed the presence of destiny in the fateful encounter. The social commentary in Hardy’s work reveals a deep concern at the rapacious speed of industrialization, most notably the violent severing of people from land they had occupied for generations. Just as Hardy’s poetic rendition of the RMS Titanic’s fated encounter with the iceberg laid bare the fallibility of the industrializing West’s arrogant push for progress, the tsunami’s conjunction with Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility has laid bare the fallacy the nuclear industry works hard to maintain, that nuclear energy is both clean and cheap. For just as the RMS Titanic proved she did, in fact, have the ability to sink, so too does the accident at the power facility expose the truth that in the context of Earth’s geological movements and instabilities, nuclear energy, far from being “clean,” is actually highly polluting and riddled with incalculable costs; both incidences suggest human action conducted in a spirit of extreme denial.

Despite the passage of time between these two events it seems that nothing has been learned. Nuclear technology is still being hailed by some in the West as a sensible alternative to burning fossil fuels, with the construction of even more power facilities currently being planned in various places around the world including the UK. Touting nuclear energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels exposes a psycho-spiritual divorce in the Western worldview in which humanity is superior to every other living thing, blinding us to the true, interconnected nature of reality. Creating destructive, polluting technologies in a landscape that constantly shifts and changes is short-sighted at best; at worst, it could lead to nothing less than the end of life as we know it. The earthquake and nuclear disaster it unleashed expose in stark and troubling ways the current crisis in our perception; the fallout from the fateful meeting of the tsunami and Daiichi nuclear power facility shows that our biggest challenge today is the broken nature of the relationship between Earth and humanity.

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The New Story

In the same year that Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was being switched on, scientists James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis were working together, formulating and refining the theory they would later publish as the Gaia hypothesis in 1974. Still contentious in many academic circles, Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis posits that the interrelated networks of Earth’s biotic systems suggest that the Earth functions holistically, as one whole, planetary-wide system. The stable environment this self-regulation or homeostasis creates is so complex that we are still learning about it. One aspect of homeostasis is the perpetual return, even after considerable disruption, to a relatively stable climate able to support and evolve life over millennia. The level and intensity of current human disruption is, paradoxically, damaging the Earth’s ability to self-regulate the conditions that humankind needs to survive.

Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis is significant, representing as it does a valiant attempt by the scientific community to offer a new story, one that challenges the reductive perspective in the West that has perpetuated for centuries. On a mythical level, naming the hypothesis after the ancient Greek goddess Gaia strikes a bold move toward integrating science and imagination, as biologist Stephan Harding has noted. In the modern myth of Earth as Gaia, humans waking up to the reality that we are Earth reveals a Cosmos that is waking up to itself through humanity.

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Our Collective Wound

The ways in which philosophical perspectives since the time of Plato have created a network of hierarchical dualisms that marginalize, dominate, exploit, and oppress women, Indigenous people, people of colour, animals, and the natural world are multiple and complex, as ecofeminists have been pointing out for more than thirty years. Collectively, these radical dualisms have led to the Western mind believing itself to be unique in the Cosmos. Separate and superior, this mindset ranks intellect above emotion while dismissing the relevance of the body and the existence of soul. Yet, within the embodied nightmare of isolation, alienation, and inner fragmentation the Western mind has created for itself, it still believes itself to be effective, as if rational thought alone will be enough to find solutions to the myriad problems it is creating, problems likely to intensify in the near future as the trajectory between the RMS Titanic and Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility appears to foretell.

Experiencing the compounded consequences of the earthquake and tsunami meeting the nuclear power facility at Fukushima throws modernity and the short-termism it encourages, especially around technology, into sharp relief. It is not the rationality of modernity that is destructive, but rather the fact that human rationality, in service to a faulty worldview, has come to serve only power. Part of the reality that the Western mind is not facing is that the very mind-body-spirit system it seeks to deny and control is itself a wounded animal. From my home in a country dubbed “Broken Britain” last year by its own politicians, I see how centuries of denial, oppression, abuse, neglect, and spiritual poverty are riddling our societies and cities with crime, homelessness, inequality, and pollution. Our human and more-than-human kin are facing extinction, nothing less, and the UK wears the shameful badge of being the most nature depleted country in Europe. Yet still so much of what needs attending to is left out of public and private conversations; we cannot attend to issues we refuse to see. As anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972) observed,

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in … For a [person] to change the basic beliefs that determine [their] perception - [their] epistemological premises - [they] must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as [they] believe it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions. (p. 217)

It is getting harder to deny that the world we are creating no longer makes sense, inviting us to open to other ways of thinking and perceiving. With the Western-become-global, industrialized, capitalist world no longer making sense, what we should be looking for is pathways to help our narrowed, Western minds widen to consider perspectives more closely aligned with the world as it really is: alive and nested within a vast field of intelligence that is the creative Cosmos. When I read the work of my fellow nature-writers here on Substack and elsewhere, I know that others are feeling this too, and this gives me tremendous hope.

The broken connections we exist in glitter and sparkle like shards of splintered glass. Language fractures our thinking and distorts our worldview, condemning our destinies unless we can change our perception. This crisis in our perception has resulted in a loss of connection to the larger context we exist in, a Cosmos that Indigenous cultures around the world understand and pay heed to in their own spiritual beliefs and daily lives. In Indigenous worldviews, relationships are key and consideration extends to all beings, in all directions; to the Great Spirit who inhabits all things, to our families and tribes, the animals, water, rocks and hills we share our lives with, and to our descendants whose future way we are preparing.

Next time: Enter the Labyrinth 5: Responding to the Roar